Overlinking Explained
Overlinking in a webpage or other hyperlinked text is having too many hyperlinks (links).[1] [2]
It is characterized by:
- A large proportion of the words in each sentence are rendered as links.
- Links that have little information content, such as linking on specific years like 1995, or unnecessary linking of common words used in the common way, for which the reader can be expected to understand the word's full meaning in context, without any hyperlink help.
- A link for any single term is excessively repeated in the same article. "Excessive" is usually more than one link for the same term in a line or a paragraph, since in this case, one or more duplicate links will almost certainly then appear needlessly on the viewer's screen. The purpose of links is to direct the reader to a new spot at the point(s) where the reader is most likely to take a temporary detour due to needing more information. Providing more link samples for the same word in a short space (as in the bad example of this paragraph) doesn't help much.
Related concepts
The opposites of overlinking are "null linking" and "underlinking", which are phenomena in which hyperlinks are reduced to such a degree as to remove all pointers to a likely-needed context of an unusual term, in the text-area where the term occurs.[2] This results in reader frustration. Underlinking results whenever a reader encounters an odd term in an article (perhaps not even for the first time) and wants to briefly browse more deeply at that point, but finds they cannot, but rather is required to conduct an extensive search far up near the beginning of the article, in order to locate the only instance of the word or term being linked— or perhaps even to find that it hasn't been linked at all.
References
- Web site: PCMag.com Encyclopedia. PC Magazine. 2007-01-19. 2012-06-14. https://web.archive.org/web/20120614220146/http://www.pcmag.com/encyclopedia_term/0%2C2542%2Ct%3Doverlinking%26i%3D48688%2C00.asp. dead.
- News: . Missing Links . . April 2002 .
